English Premiership Football Roundup Week 15

Despite the deteriorating English Winter weather there was some fantastic football played in the Premiership this first December weekend.

First match of the weekend continued the steady progress of Rafa Benitez’ Liverpool, who saw off the sadly fading Wigan 3-0 for an easy victory in which Scouse striker Peter Crouch finally broke his scoring duck and took the West Coast boys surfing up to third place.

In the later games, two of the North West’s most unpredictable teams swapped roles with Blackburn tamely surrendering home advantage to an unusually sharp Everton 0-2; Lancashire neighbours Bolton Wanderers played to their full potential and sent a subdued Arsenal home on the wrong end of a 2-0 beating; leaders Chelsea maintained their ten point lead at the top with an unconvincing 1-0 home victory against Middlesborough; Newcastle failed to take advantage of the troubled Aston Villa, drawing 1-1; Spurs just shaded a thrilling match with bottom of the table Sunderland, winning 3-2 whilst basement cases West Brom and Fulham tottered to a sterile 0-0 draw.

The last game of the day produced the (George) best football, as a newly confident Manchester United, probably due to the fact they’ve started playing 4-4-2 again, brushed aside managerless Portsmouth 3-0, thanks to goals from Paul Scholes, Wayne Rooney and Ruud van Nistelrooy.

Sunday’s game produced a feast of goals as Manchester City swamped hosts Charlton Athletic 2-5 with former Red Devil Andy Cole scoring twice for City to consolidate their place in the top half of the table.

Monday night in Birmingham, never an enticing prospect, became all the worse for the home team as visitors West Ham proved too strong and determined, running out 1-2 victors.

There we have it for Week 15, no change at the top of the table but everything’s still all to play for; Chelsea have got to drop some more points soon, right?

American sports are so dull, with no relegation to worry about, that the Yanks get as much fun predicting the results as they do from the matches themselves so I thought I just might point out that my predictions for this weekend’s results were correct in six out of ten games this weekend!

Hi Matt: okey-dokey, it’s like this. World football is run by FIFA and they also run the World Cup every four years (it actually does involve EVERY country in the world too!); the next World Cup is next year in Germany and you may be surprised and/or delighted to learn that yes, the USA has qualified!

European Football is run by UEFA and they organise the Champions League. This pan-European competition used to be contested by only the national champions of each European state but nowadays anything from 1 to 4 teams from each country qualify, probably to expand the cash generated I’d imagine.

This was the competition that my beloved Manchester United were knocked out of last night, the first time for eleven years that we have been eliminated at such an early point in the competition which we last won in 1999 in Barcelona.

The Premier League is the highest level of English football and three teams out of twenty are relegated each season, which tends to weed out weak teams and management quite effectively! There is a whole load of lower leagues below that, all the way down to school level.

Teams can, and do, go all the way from non-League football to the Premiership (the latest to pull off this epic achievement being Wigan Athletic), mirroring the US philosophy that cream rises to the top (oddly, this only seems to apply to every part of US life except sports!) and all English Football is controlled by the Football Association (the FA), who also organise the gloriously romantic FA Cup, which is competed for by every team in the country, professional or amateur and is totally unseeded. This means that, in theory at least, even you and I could play ourselves all the way to the FA Cup Final at Wembley given the right run of results. And anything can happen in a ninety minute match, just as it so unbelievably did last night.

The only other thing you must always remember, and this is VITAL, is that unless you want to be considered the worst sort of ultra-nerd saddo loser, don’t EVER call it s*cc*r. [Can’t even type the word! LOL]